Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/Chunking

This page is an archive of the discussion about the proposed deletion of the article below. This page is no longer live. Further comments should be made on the article's talk page rather than here so that this page is preserved as an historic record.
The result of the debate was - kept

Chunking

Barely readable original research, and in a non-encyclopedic style to boot. -Seth Mahoney 23:34, Sep 26, 2004 (UTC)

Delete. Incoherent original research. — Gwalla | Talk 23:56, 26 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Redirect to Short-term memory until someone writes an actual article on "chunking," which is a generally recognized term in cognitive psychology. The word chunking was originated in a famous paper, Miller, G. A. (1956), The magical number seven, plus or minus two: Some limits on our capacity for processing information Psychological Review, 63, 81-97. See Short-term memory#Capacity of short-term memory which now unfortunately links to this article. Miller noted that the capacity of short-term memory, in a number of contexts, seemed to be around seven, "plus or minus two." That is, most people can remember a seven-digit telephone number, but not a sixteen-digit credit-card number. Aha! Found the full article online at http://cogprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/archive/00000730/00/miller.html . Miller noted that "Since the memory span is a fixed number of chunks, we can increase the number of bits of information that it contains simply by building larger and larger chunks, each chunk containing more information than before." No time to do anything about this now... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 01:23, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Fantastic. I change my vote to redirect. -Seth Mahoney 02:35, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)

Oddly enough, I see that although his paper is very much concerned with the concept of a chunk, and its distinction from information-theoretic entities, he never uses the world chunking, but consistently uses the word recoding instead. That's just a comment. I may take a whack at rewriting this myself if nobody beats me to it. As I thought, and as Google confirms, the word "chunking" sensu Miller is in very wide use now, and often in the context of a memorization or mnemonic strategy. Miller's work is often casually applied and misapplied in the context of presentation design, e.g. people advocating the use of uncluttered web pages invoke "seven plus-or-minus two" to suggest that a page shouldn't have more than seven thingies on it... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 12:47, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)

It is also a generally recognized computer term, both for memory management and for HTTP encoding. The Steve 08:28, Sep 27, 2004 (UTC)
- Well, if we need disambiguation we might as well also throw in Chun King food products. I love the description on ConAgra]'s website: "Chun King's bi-pack complete meals have been a fixture of the Chinese shelf-stable market for many years." Yes sir, folks, when you think of Chinese shelf-stable bi-pack complete meals, think of the first name in Chinese shelf-stable bi-pack complete meals: Chun King! Still true to the authentic tradition of Jeno Paulucci of Cambridge, Massachusetts!... [[User:Dpbsmith|Dpbsmith (talk)]] 23:14, 27 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Keep, and send to cleanup. I actually searched for chunking on Wikipedia a few months back. Darksun 19:44, 28 Sep 2004 (UTC)
Keep, and send to Cleanup. Genuine area of the study of learning. Ambi 09:23, 30 Sep 2004 (UTC)
keep. Standard term in cognitive psychology, used by Douglas Hofstadter amongst others Robinh 13:07, 1 Oct 2004 (UTC)
Delete Little value User:MartinSpamer

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